


You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

by thought



Series: War Stories and Other Fairy Tales [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 02:00:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2331059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thought/pseuds/thought
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So let's say "Texas"--</p>
            </blockquote>





	You want a better story. Who wouldn't?

So let's say Texas—

No. Just that. Let's say "Texas". Not Allison. Tex, maybe. Take the drawl out of it. Take the expectations and the disappointments while you're at it, leave it cut with anger and loneliness and a bit stained with motor oil but otherwise intact. Take one man's rage and pull it out of the neck of the person it was directed towards. Take one man's rage and put it beneath the heel of a scuffed boot and stomp down. Remember she has killed for less and she does not care what your morals have to say about it.

Let's say "Texas". The man at the shuttle port laughs under his breath. "Nothing there but dirt and graveyards," he says, but he hands over a ticket. She thinks endless fields capped by early sunrise, guns on blacktop to the tune of an old radio. Whisky and two working fists in the nighttime heat. Home, maybe. She might be walking right back into the same trap she’s just escaped. Hard to say.

"Texas," she says, when the woman in the hardhat and cigarette smoke asks for a name. Her hand is rough and strong and maybe the nerves and the skin and the bones are artificial but there's still a basic human connection that comes from one empty hand to another. I am here and I bare no arms, here is my body and there is your body and here we are, two bodies of billions hurtling through space on a ball of rock. Please hold on tight.

She spends her days under vehicles (or under their hoods), comes out dirty and tired and grinning. She works hard. She's good at that. She paints her tiny apartment bright teal in respect. The sun shines in each morning and it's like waking up in the sky, bright and open and limitless. The flowers in her window box grow large and colourful and every time it rains she opens the window wide so she can breathe in the smell of growing things. She is learning that there is more to living than mimicry. More than blood under flesh that classifies a being as alive. She keeps a bag of coffee for guests and a pack of cigarettes for when she needs something to do with her hands but she does not otherwise force herself to the standards of "normality".

The day the war ends Texas is tuning up the motor on an ancient warthog, singing along to The Rolling stones and watching the thunderclouds drift in from the west. A man down the road shouts "We won!" and the scattered cheers get picked up by the dusty winds and swept back and forth across the pavement and dirt and low buildings. She shouts out her joy with a mouthful of dust and it's carried away with the dead leaves. She's laughing. Everyone is laughing. Everyone is shouting into the wind, hoping that their joy will be carried to someone else. The connections are fleeting but powerful. She clinks her beer bottle against her neighbour's later that night and pours the contents over the dog tags she's been wearing in celebration. In honour.

That night lightning cracks across the expanse of the sky like fireworks, the wind battering fat raindrops in through her window. She lies on her back on the mattress on the floor and pulls the blankets up high over her shoulders. The radio broadcasts news of their victory on a continuous loop, and in the streets outside and through the paper thin walls there are people laughing and crying and breaking bottles. The world seems untethered, like to reach peace they must travel this alien wormhole of distorted noise and frantic wind. Remember this. Remember that this is the last night before the universe is new again. She lies there for hours. She does not sleep. No one sleeps, really. Her flowers are still in their boxes, the walls in the white bright flashes from outside a glowing, washed-out blue. The colour strikes a chord but she closes her eyes and presses her hands down to the sheets and revels in the physicality of existence.

In the morning there are broken branches and broken glass strewn across the front steps of her apartment building. There's also a ghost, remarkably unbroken and holding the battered, sticky dog tags like they're a treasure.

So let's say Texas, but let's also say Connecticut. Let's say Texas shot Connecticut but soldiers don’t' go down that easy, let's say there's a lot more value in anybody's head than there is in their armour. Let's say, nobody quite knows what happened, really, and that might include Connecticut. But the war is over. Remember that the war is over.

"I’m not sorry," Texas says, boiling water for coffee. "Not for what I did."

CT laughs lowly. Her eyes are harder than Tex remembers. "Me neither. Sorry for what a lot of other people did, though."

"I'm not," Tex says. "I'm not taking anybody's responsibility but mine."

CT smiles. "Good. I'm working on it."

Tex pours coffee into one mug. CT takes it, and then she takes her hand. CT says, "You have any regrets?"

A few," Tex says, and kisses her like screaming joy into the wind in hopes that someone else will hear. CT smells like antiseptic and cheap perfume and her ribs stick out under layers of fading and fresh bruises. Tex kisses her with a chipped old teacup in her hand and a staticky radio playing in the background and wonders how many knives she'll have to navigate around this time. Tex's jacket is leather and old and soft and CT slides hands under it like she's looking for weapons. Tex lets her look. She won't find anything. Tex knows she was made as a weapon, but she has learned how to put the safety on.

"That your girl back from the war?" someone asks the next week.

Tex kicks her boots against the old fence boards where she's leaning. "Nah,” she says. “Not back y et. But she's on her way."


End file.
